By Joseph Ax
NEW YORK, May 4 (Reuters) - Reuters won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting on Monday for a series of stories revealing how social-media behemoth Meta knowingly exposed users, including children,
to harmful artificial intelligence chatbots and made billions of dollars from fraudulent ads on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The work, authored by technology investigations reporter Jeff Horwitz with China correspondent Engen Tham, used previously unreported internal documents as well as innovative techniques testing Facebook and Instagram accounts to unearth secrets of Meta's business model.
Horwitz exposed how Meta's internal guidelines explicitly allowed its AI chatbots to conduct "sensual" conversations with children. A related story detailed how a cognitively disabled New Jersey man died of injuries he sustained in a fall after running away from home for what he believed would be a romantic rendezvous with a young woman following a series of conversations with a Meta chatbot.
Other reports demonstrated the extent to which Meta profited from illicit advertising.
In one story, Horwitz showed the tech giant was knowingly flooding users with billions of ads for scams every day and earning an estimated 10% of its annual revenue from them, or about $16 billion.
Horwitz and Tham subsequently detailed the critical role played by Chinese companies in this business. Another story revealed Meta's "global playbook" for defeating effective anti-scam regulations around the world.
Horwitz employed creative techniques to establish some of the key findings. In one instance, he created an account registered to a fictitious 14-year-old to show the impact of Meta's decision to give bots the capacity for romantic role-play with minors. For another piece, he placed experimental ads for bogus get-rich-quick schemes on Facebook and Instagram.
The reporting sparked regulatory probes and litigation around the world and prompted Meta itself to reform key practices. In response to the outcry over the chatbot coverage, Meta immediately revised its AI guidelines to stop letting its bots engage in romantic talk with children.
Reuters also had finalists in two other Pulitzer categories. A team of photographers were finalists for breaking news photography for images that vividly documented the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration across the U.S. Another team of journalists were finalists for illustrated reporting for a project that used graphic-novel techniques to explore the scam compounds of Asia, where people were forced by criminal gangs to work in mass fraud operations.
"These extraordinary recognitions reflect the very best of Reuters journalism: fearless, deeply reported, original work that holds powerful institutions to account," said Alessandra Galloni, editor-in-chief of Reuters.
The Pulitzer Prizes, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in 1917, are considered the highest honor in American journalism. This year's award is the 14th for Reuters, including seven for reporting and seven for photography, all since 2008.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Helen Coster; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
